Borrowing of Argument Structure in Contact Situations (BASICS): the case of medieval English under French influence

• Applicants: Professor Dr. Achim Stein; Professorin Dr. Carola Trips
• Subject Area: Applied Linguistics, Computational Linguistics ; Individual Linguistics, Historical Linguistics
• Term: from 2015 to 2022
• Project identifier: Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (DFG) - Project number 265711632

The original BASICS proposal was based on the hypothesis that structural borrowing in situations of intense contact has effects on the recipient language and that these effects can be identified in a diachronic analysis of the argument structure of verbs. At the end of phase 1, our previous findings have not only confirmed this hypothesis to some degree but have also shed new light on the rise and development of a number of grammatical structures of English. Despite these encouraging results, we have good reasons to continue this project: first, one-directional borrowing does not capture the complexity of the contact situation and the phenomena we have come across, nor does the term borrowing. We have dealt with different types of copying, and found that copying is bidirectional. Therefore Anglo-French as a contact variety needs to be investigated in greater depth, and our new cooperation with the Anglo-Norman Dictionary project enables us to do so. Second, many phenomena only surface in diachronic verb-related analyses, and due to the difficulty of lemmatising ME verbs we are only at the beginning of the ‘harvesting period’. We are convinced that the research in phase 2 will allow us not only to corroborate our previous findings, and to provide a new and much clearer picture of this particular historical contact situation, but also to make a significant contribution to theoretical aspects of contact linguistics and language change, i.e. to propose how contact and its structural effects can be modelled. Finally we think we have found the ideal team of researchers to investigate this highly specialized domain further, and that it is very likely that we can deliver crucial results on the empirical and theoretical level only by the end of phase 2.

• DFG Programme: Research Grants